Ayn Rand Is Spinning in Her Grave: Top Administration Lawyer Says It’s Okay to Go Galt!

The line between political truth and literary fiction is getting very blurry. One of the main features of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the choice of productive people to withdraw their talents from the economy to deprive the statists of a source of loot.

Who would have guessed, more than 50 years later, that the Solicitor General of the United States would be making the same argument in a legal case about Obamacare.

President Obama’s solicitor general, defending the national health care law on Wednesday, told a federal appeals court that Americans who didn’t like the individual mandate could always avoid it by choosing to earn less money. Neal Kumar Katyal, the acting solicitor general, made the argument under questioning before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, which was considering an appeal by the Thomas More Law Center.

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Seems like the political dynamics are setting the Western World into an inescapable path to group economic suicide.

It’s the vicious cycle of decline: The more desperate declining cultures get, the more self destructive they become. Having grown up in Europe, I’ve seen this movie many times. Under the new entitlement juggernaut America is now following the same script.

Social Security and Medicare were already undermining America’s status as most prosperous country on earth. So what did Americans do? They voted for another third entitlement program, one with the most perverse incentives of all: That all you have to do to get someone else to pay your 15-20K cost of health insurance is to make less than about $90K per year (i.e. by reducing your contribution to GDP you increase government costs and the desire of productive people to continue working). Not even the Welfare states of Europe have an incentive that is so pernicious to productivity. That alone will be America’s tipping point. 2014 is coming. The year of America’s economic precipice.

Productive poeple will not quit to spike the statists. They will do so more as a matter of practicallity.

As taxes increase, and thus becoming rich becomes ever more difficult, more and more of the most capable and productive people will realize something that the left has typically been saying all along: That “Money does not bring happiness”. That there are other, easier ways, to increase one’s happiness. Ways that do not involve breaking your head competing with other equally smart people in trying to figure out how ever more humans can have new products, medicines and services they have never had before and/or at a lower price than before. So ever more of the most capable and productive people will realize that it is not worth enclosing yourself in office 4 walls (even if they are at the Hyatt) and perhaps even get to the point of being in poor health from the stress and competition intensity of trying to invent, commercialize or make cheaper stuff in a ways that no one else has been able to do before.

So be Greek. Take the left’s advice. Money does not bring happiness. Head for the beach. Low cost, high value to you, more or less worthless for everyone else. But who cares. You are a selfish conservative anyway. Aren’t you? Leave it to the left to improve prosperity and enjoy yourself. There’s only one life. Don’t waste it working.

No, not ALL productive people will make the above realization. But enough to have less production incentives than before. Enough for the decreased growth rates to make most people in the Western World a little worse off, in a relative sense, a little more needy than before, and, of course, a little more desperate to vote for yet some more redistribution and mandatory compassion at the polls. This my friends, is the vicious cycle of decline that has finally come to America and will end American exceptionalism. You had it, did not appreciate it, you lost it. Welcome down to the permanent state of mandatory collectivism and low growth.

…and to make a more somber connection to the Osama Bin laden jokes:

Having contributed towards America’s descent into mandatory collectivism, more than perhaps any other person, Osama Bin Laden is poised to have the last laugh on American Decline. The main joke is on the American people and the structurally suicidal path they took in response to OBL’s terrorist attacks.

How is the Solicitor General’s quote a promotion of going Galt? Going Galt doesn’t mean earning less, it means taking one’s productive abilities out of the coercive economy. So, if I could opt out of healthcare AND NOT PAY TAXES, that would be going Galt.

The idealistic characters of Ayn Rand’s novels are quite rare in the real world. But the correlation between redistribution and productivity is very real. Perhaps a more realistic term is “Going Laffer”. I’d title this post:

A have a modest proposal. So, we are supposedly not being forced to buy insurance unconstitutionally because we can merely choose to quit our jobs and make less money—which places the law into the category an economic regulation of employment. Well, if this is a just and fair suggestion, might I make a proposal of my own? I think all doctors should deny medical care for a month to all Federal employees outside the military—including urgent care. And if those employees want medical care, they can simply quite their jobs with the Federal government. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.